Okay, check out this quote about economics. Then guess who wrote it and when.
“It simply made no sense to us. There were no immutable ‘laws’ – or damned few – about it. Economics was not a ‘science’ at all; it was fruitless to treat it as such, and to study it as a special, exclusive field. It was all mixed up with politics, with sociology, with geography and a good many other things. Clearly the ‘economic laws’ of competition were a fantastic delusion, merely an elaborate effort to justify things as they were by the invention of supposedly unchangeable forces which men mustn’t attempt to interfere with. It seemed to us as much of a hoax as the medieval scholars’ explanation of kingly authority as something derived from God. The system did not work, and if it did not work in America it certainly would not work anywhere.”
Was it Ha-Joon Chang, a noted member of those forging what I would call new economics, who recognize that the only economics are political economics, and that economics is a constructed set of conditions, not natural or human laws? Was it best-selling Thomas Picketty, the noted French economist, who has said his true admiration is for historians and sociologists, not contemporary economists, whose perspective tends to be so narrow? Was it Nassim Taleb, who in is influential book “The Black Swan” satirized economists as having “physics envy” in thinking their discipline a natural science that colud be captured by equations? Was it me, in my last book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, where I also railed against the incorrect tendency to view economics as a science?
None of the above. It was Eric Sevareid, the once famous newscaster who began as one of Edward R. Murrow’s boy in wartime London and France, and ended up on the CBS evening news in the 1960s and 1970s. He was describing realizations he and fellow students came to in the early 1930s while undergraduates at the University of Minnesota. The actual quotes are from Sevareid’s amazing memoir, published in 1946, Not So Wild A Dream, which leads the reader from his childhood, through his epic canoe trip as a teenager, then his experiences in the Great Depression, and finally his amazing experiences and insights in World War II. It’s a wonderful, fascinating book, that I came across by accident and am so glad now I took the trouble to read all 500 or so pages of it.
The quote about economics is all the more impressive in that it’s just a minor side note to a book that is largely about World War II and the great events there.
I remember Sevareid. He would deliver his craggy essays at the end of the evening news with Walter Cronkite in the 1960s and 1970s. Even as a child and later teenager, I was struck by them. How wonderful that CBS news featured him, and how telling that it would be unthinkable today.
His 1946 book, his only major work, was written mostly about and just after concluding his amazing wartime experiences as a foreign correspondent. Sevareid was almost everywhere it mattered. He was in France when the German tanks rumbled through the French fields and eventually into Paris; he was in London during the blitz; and he was in China during the American-Chinese-English campaign against the Japanese. In 1943 and 1944 he was in Italy during the American push up the boot, and then he was with the American army on D-day and afterward pushing up through France. He not only survived, he delivered some of the most astute judgments I have read about individuals and groups, including nationalities, that I have read anywhere.